Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Business Chatbots Taking Over

Chat apps characteristics
make them very appealing to businesses and marketers. Prominent ones include their
size, user retention, usage rates, and user demographics. In fact, the combined
user base of the top four chat apps is larger than that of the top four social
networks. Chat apps also have higher retention and usage rates than most mobile
apps. Finally, the majority of their users are young, an extremely important
demographic for brands, advertisers and publishers.

These chat app traits have accelerated the
blending of artificial intelligence and business service functions to create
the modern chatbot. Recent advances in this area include:

A chatbot’s ability to conduct engaging human conversations which has allowed businesses to leverage the inexpensive and wide-reaching technology to engage with more consumers;

The greater suitability of chatbots with mobile devices;

The robust and rapid
evolution of the chatbot ecosystem which include third-party chat bots, native
bots, distribution channels, and a new marketplace for its enabling technology;
and

A promising chatbot
business model for messaging apps and the developers who build bots for these
platforms.

A surprising example
of this embryonic business model is my own 21 year-old daughter! Known as Ljskater_X_Void
on Twitch, she uses an entire
team of chatbots to manage her online audience:

A customized Ankhbot (referred to as LjskaterxVoidBot) to interact with Twitch stream using a coin system to manage audience

Mee6 bot used to cross promote and advertise streaming partnersstatistics

NadekoBot used to create master bot (On Discord referred to as Skaterbot) to manage all the other bots

Muxybot connects through Discord to announce streaming events and stats

For
technology support in the enterprise
business space, a Watson-enabled Slack
chatbot
is being used to help enterprise teams identify and fix IT and network
operational incidents. This bot blends messaging, cloud computing, IT support
and network operations in order to improve customer service. To accelerate its
own chatbot business, IBM has released a Watson Botkit middleware plugin that
allows the Watson Conversation service to talk to Slack and other messaging
channels.

Information
technology is not the only industry vertical deploying chatbots:

News Industry uses chatbots to
deliver breaking news directly as a private message in the user’s messenger.
This information is displayed at login.

A 3D printing industry chatbot that receives a 3D file and then instantly searches for 3D printing services providing you with price quotes and material options.

With
a chatbot implemented, entertainment industry customers can find movie and
event details about movies and events, finding available timings, booking a
reservation, and initiating cancellation much easier and faster without human
assistance. It has also increased the business of online movie ticket and event
ticket booking.

Health bots can answer more than
100 health questions, provides recommendations based on the query and even help
to find a nearby doctor.

Customer
service bots are replacing human assistance with the automated message service.

In
the travel industry a bot can reduce the work load by sending ticket
confirmation details, check in notifications, and other such important
information automatically to the customer.

If
chatbots are now in your business future, you should try Cognitive Concierge a part of IBM’s
chatbot ecosystem that makes recommendations to the user based on a
conversation with the application’s chatbot.

This post was brought to you by IBM Global Technology Services. For more content like this, visit ITBizAdvisor.com